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Scientists shocked by massive discovery about humans

An incredible new study would totally change our understanding of human evolution if confirmed to be true.

An astonishing new study is making a huge claim about the human race that would completely upend our understanding of where we came from. The study, published in PLOS ONE, suggests that our very first ancestors may have emerged out of Europe 7.2 million years ago, not out of Africa as is widely believed among scientists.

The international team of scientists presented their findings in two studies that claim that chimpanzees and humans diverged in the Eastern Mediterranean, and not East Africa. This is based on two fossils of the species Graecopithecus freybergi, found in Greece and Bulgaria and dated to more than 7 million years ago.

Scientists had previously though hominims first split off from chimpanzees between 5 and 7 million years ago, with the hominin line beginning in Africa, but this new find would suggest that our understanding of human evolution is fundamentally wrong, at least in terms of its origin.

“The common lineage of great apes and humans split several hundred thousand earlier than hitherto assumed, according to an international research team headed by Professor Madelaine Böhme from the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen and Professor Nikolai Spassov from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences,” the statement from the University of Toronto reads. “The researchers investigated two fossils of Graecopithecus freybergi with state-of-the-art methods and came to the conclusion that they belong to pre-humans. Their findings, published today in two papers in the journal PLOS ONE, further indicate that the split of the human lineage occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean and not – as customarily assumed – in Africa.”